Little Birds by Anaïs Nin Page B

lying on a wide, low bed, with her skirts wrinkled, her hair loose, and rouge spread unevenly around her lips. By her side lay a man twice her weight and size who was dressed like a workman, with corduroy trousers and a leather jacket, which he had opened, showing his bare neck, not confined by a shirt collar.
    She shifted slightly to study him. She could see the high cheekbone shaped in such a way that he seemed to be always laughing, and his eyes turned upwards at the corners with perpetual humor. His hair looked uncombed, and his gestures were easy as he smoked.
    Jan was an artist who laughed at hunger, at work, at slavery, at everything. He preferred to be a tramp rather than lose his freedom to sleep as late as he liked, to eat what he could find at the time he wanted it, to paint only when the passion for work took him.
    The room was full of his paintings. His palette was covered with paint that was still wet. He had asked Laura to pose for him, and began the work with great eagerness, not seeing her as a person, but observing the shape of her head, the way it seemed to rest on a neck too small for its weight, which gave her an air of almost frightening fragility. She had thrown herself on the bed. As she posed she looked up at the ceiling.
    The house was a very old one, with chipped paint and uneven plastering. As she had looked, the roughness of the plaster and its many cracks began to assume shapes. She smiled. There in the jumbled lines and cracks and churned surface she could see all kinds of forms.
    She had said to Jan: "When you are finished with your work, I want you to make a drawing for me on the ceiling, of something that is already there, if you can see what I see..."
    Jan had become curious, and he did not want to work much longer anyway. He had reached the baffling and difficult stage of feet and hands, which he disliked; they perpetually eluded him, so he often wrapped them up in a cloud of formless swathing, like the feet and hands of a cripple, and left the drawing as it was, all body, a body without feet to run away on or hands to caress anyone with.
    He turned to the study of the ceiling. To do this he lay back on the bed next to Laura and looked up with keen interest, seeking the forms she had distinguished and following the oudines she indicated with her forefinger.
    "See, see, there ... do you see the woman lying back...?"
    Jan rose halfway in the bed—the ceiling was very low in that corner, being an attic room—and with his charcoal began to draw on the plaster. First he sketched the woman's head and her shoulders, but then he found the oudine of the legs, which he completed, pointing the toes.
    "The skirt, the skirt, I see the skirt," said Laura.
    "I see it here," said Jan, drawing a skirt that was quite evidently thrown upwards, leaving her legs and thighs bare. Then Jan darkened the hair around the sex, carefully, as if he were painting grass blade by blade, and added detail to the converging lines of the legs. And there was the woman, reclining on the ceiling without shame, where Jan could look at her with a tiny flame of erotic response, which Laura caught in his intensely blue eyes, and which made her jealous.
    To irritate him as he looked at the woman she said, "I see a little piglike animal very near her."
    Wrinkling his brow, Jan looked intently to find the outline, but he did not see it. He began to draw at random, following rough ragged edges and confused lines, and what began to take form was a dog who was climbing over the woman, and, with one last ironic stroke of the charcoal, he drew in the dog's knifelike sex almost touching the woman's pubic hair.
    Laura said, "I see another dog."
    "I don't see it," said Jan, and he lay back fully on the bed to admire his drawing, while Laura stood up and began to draw a dog that was climbing over Jan's dog from behind, in the most classical of poses, his shaggy head of hair buried in the other's back as if he were devouring it.
    Then